'Dreaming a Paradise' book review: Insightful, thought-provoking and unsettling
In her book Dreaming a Paradise: Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid, documentary photographer, filmmaker and writer Chitvan Gill writes (quoting from various sources): “… more than half the population of Delhi lives in ‘illegal, makeshift’ and unplanned shelters, which are, by and by, ‘regularised’, creating self-inflicted chaos… by 2019, 1,797 unauthorised colonies had come up on public or private land without any approved layout or building plans. An estimated four million people were living in these neighbourhoods…”
Numbers, which often rob the truth of its humanity, let the more privileged forget that these are people being talked of; people with feelings, who too have a right to aspire to something more than mere existence. It is these people Gill tries to acquaint us with in Dreaming a Paradise, a look, up close and personal, at the inhabitants of the area known as Buland Masjid, in Delhi’s Shastri Park area.
Gill near-bookends her work with chapters devoted to specific residents of Buland Masjid. There’s Maqsood in Chapter 2, who was forced as a child to give up studying because he is a Muslim. And yet he—like Haji Aneesud Din of Chapter 8, whose comfortable childhood fell apart after his father’s death—is a ‘good human being’, one who works not just for social welfare, but also for awareness. Gill tells the stories of Maqsood and Haji, and others like them with sensitivity and compassion, interspersing them with information, facts and insight. She quotes from literature, studies and memoirs to build up a compelling and disturbing picture of a ruthless world, engineered to serve the rich at the expense of the poor.
She also manages to effectively provide a nuanced view of how a migrant community like Buland Masjid may be worthy of both our admiration and compassion. She shows how the residents have hauled themselves up from dire poverty and turned their lives around to give their children an education good enough to move out.
Even though Buland Masjid is the focus of Dreaming a Paradise, it looks at larger inequalities and forces that drive people away from their homes. She throws light on the dynamics of ‘slums’ not just in Delhi or India, but across the world, and the grit it takes to survive in them.
Within the modest length—150 pages—of the book, Gill packs in a lot, including arresting photographs of Buland Masjid and its inhabitants. The book starts off a little unsure, its first chapter (The Migration) somewhat verbose. But once Gill hits her stride, it becomes a fine testament to Buland Masjid, to migrants everywhere: insightful, thought-provoking, unsettling, even inspiring, in its own way.
Dreaming a Paradise: Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid
By: Chitvan Gill
Publisher: Seagull
Pages: 186
Price: Rs 599